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Copyright of HETS Online Journal is the property of Hispanic Educational Technology Services, Inc. (HETS) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Over the past two decades, high school reform has been characterized by a belief that “smaller is better.” Much of the expected academic benefit from attending small schools has been credited to their better learning environments. There is little empirical support for this claim, however, and the existing research fails to provide causal evidence. Moreover, recent studies in New York City have shown that students attending newly created small schools do better academically relative to students attending both large and older established small schools. Are these differences in academic outcomes also mirrored by differences in learning environments? In this paper, we address this question by exploring the impact of attending large compared to small high schools on students’ learning environments, considering the differences between small high schools formed in two different eras with different missions and resources. We use a unique data set of school and student-level data from New York City public high school students entering 9th grade in 2008–09 and 2009–10 to examine students’ attitudes about school learning environments along three dimensions: interpersonal relationships, academic expectations and support, and social behavior and safety. While OLS results show that students attending small schools (new and old) perceive better learning environments, instrumenting for selection into these schools challenges those results. In general, it is not clear that small schools provide better learning environments than large schools. Our results challenge the conventional wisdom that the higher academic performance of students in small schools is driven by a better learning environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of Asian peers on non-Asian student achievement in New York City public schools. We use exogenous variation in the share of Asian students across cohorts within schools stemming from a fertility shock among the Asian population in the Chinese year of the Dragon. Results show that a 10-percentage-point increase in the share of Asian students reduces non-Asian math and ELA scores by 0.14 and 0.16 standard deviations. The reduction in achievement is associated with an increase in the share of non-Asian students who fail to demonstrate the skills expected at the grade, especially in math. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We apply "value-added" models to estimate the effects of teachers on an outcome they cannot plausibly affect: student height. When fitting the relatively simple models that are widely used in educational practice to New York City data, we find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and reading, raising potential concerns about value-added estimates of teacher effectiveness. We consider two explanations: nonrandom sorting of students to teachers and idiosyncratic classroom-level variation. We cannot rule out sorting on unobservables, but do not find that students are sorted to teachers based on lagged height. The correlation in teacher effects estimates on height across years and the correlation between teacher effects on height and teacher effects on achievement are insignificant. The large estimated "effects" for height appear to be driven by year-to-year classroom-by-teacher variation that isn't often separable from true effects in models commonly estimated in practice. Reassuringly for use of these models in research settings, models which disentangle persistent effects from transient classroom-level variation yield the theoretically expected effects of zero for teacher value added on height. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational accountability is dominated by a focus on test scores to assess academic achievement. An emerging trend toward "next-generation" accountability includes a broader conception of student learning and multiple metrics. A policy design approach is used to analyze this trend. Four design elements—goals, actors, metrics, and consequences—are used to compare accountability systems in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Key design trends include broader accountability goals, multiple metrics with different data types, and an emphasis on school improvement. Although facing challenges, urban school districts have opportunities to play a role in shaping this accountability debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the link between school climate and student academic progress in New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) high schools. Using a data set compiled from 2010-2011 NYCDOE school-level aggregated demographic, survey, and progress report achievement data, the authors ran ordinary least squares regressions where they found that a school’s climate significantly correlated with student academic progress; under some conditions, the school climate effects outweighed the effects of student background factors. Finally, the school climate domains of safety and respect, communication, engagement, and academic expectations all proved to be important factors that were associated with student achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association of indirect exposure to firearm-related violence and standardized test scores among third grade elementary school children were analyzed using geospatial mapping of police department data for all gunshots in Syracuse, NY (n = 2, 127) and state standardized test scores from 2009-2015. Confirmed gunshots were geocoded and mapped across the city and neighborhood school catchment areas. Third grade standardized New York State test scores for English Language Arts (ELA) and math were coded as dichotomous variables of proficient and below proficient scores. State standardized test scores for ELA and math were found to be 50% lower in the elementary schools located within higher concentration gunshot areas, than in elementary schools in lower gunshot areas. Higher levels of gun violence within school catchment areas were significantly associated with higher rates of ELA and math failure (p ≤.05). These findings suggest that community violence may be an important, though under recognized, social determinant of poor school performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coordinated single-offer school assignment systems are a popular education reform. We show that uncoordinated offers in NYC's school assignment mechanism generated mismatches. One-third of applicants were unassigned after the main round and later administratively placed at less desirable schools. We evaluate the effects of the new coordinated mechanism based on deferred acceptance using estimated student preferences. The new mechanism achieves 80 percent of the possible gains from a no-choice neighborhood extreme to a utilitarian benchmark. Coordinating offers dominates the effects of further algorithm modifications. Students most likely to be previously administratively assigned experienced the largest gains in welfare and subsequent achievement. (JEL C78, D82, I21, I28) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impacts of Opportunity New York City–Family Rewards, the first holistic conditional cash transfer (CCT) program evaluated in the United States, on parental financial investments in children, and high school students' academic time use, motivations and self-beliefs, and achievement outcomes. Family Rewards, launched by the Center for Economic Opportunity in the Mayor's Office of the City of New York in 2007 and codesigned and evaluated by MDRC, offered cash assistance to low-income families conditioned on family investments in three areas: children's education, family preventive health care, and parents' employment. Results that rely on a random assignment design find that Family Rewards resulted in statistically significant increases in parental spending and saving on education for all students, and increased savings for those students most academically prepared at baseline and for girls, as well as statistically significant increases in academic time use and achievement outcomes for these same academically prepared students. There were no impacts on student motivations and self-beliefs. Implications are discussed for conditional cash transfer programs as well as for interventions targeting high-risk children and families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use quantile treatment effects estimation to examine the consequences of the random-assignment New York City School Choice Scholarship Program across the distribution of student achievement. Our analyses suggest that the program had negligible and statistically insignificant effects across the skill distribution. In addition to contributing to the literature on school choice, the article illustrates several ways in which distributional effects estimation can enrich educational research: First, we demonstrate that moving beyond a focus on mean effects estimation makes it possible to generate and test new hypotheses about the heterogeneity of educational treatment effects that speak to the justification for many interventions. Second, we demonstrate that distributional effects can uncover issues even with well-studied data sets by forcing analysts to view their data in new ways. Finally, such estimates highlight where in the overall national achievement distribution test scores of children exposed to particular interventions lie; this is important for exploring the external validity of the intervention's effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the study which shows that the urban advantage (UA) program has resulted to increased student achievement on the eight-grade standardized science examination for students in New York State. It states the use of difference-in-differences framework with school fixed effects to measure impact of attending UA school. It mentions that the attending UA school has increased student performance on its eight-grade science examination.